Monthly Archives: September 2009

I had the pleasure of introducing David Gershon’s work to Portland, Oregon more than a dozen years ago. So Mike Lindberg’s quote about David’s new book caught my eye…

“Social Change 2.0 exhilarates. David Gershon has not just laid out a compelling and coherent blueprint for social change, but the vividly written stories he shares make us realize that what we thought was impossible can actually be achieved. Having been a political leader in Portland for twenty years, where I worked closely with David, I saw firsthand the power of his work to change the lives of thousands of people. He may well be the number one expert on social change in our country.”
– Mike Lindberg, former Commissioner of Public Utilities and city council member, City of Portland, Oregon

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What a pleasure to announce this… Starting immediately, the good people of Alburgh, Grand Isle, Isle La Motte, North Hero and South Hero, Vermont may subscribe to Front Porch Forum! If you live (or summer) there, please sign up today! And please tell your friends and contacts on the Islands to join FPF too.

A core group of organizers, led by Ruth Wallman of the local Chamber, Frank Driscoll, and Darcy Coates, have labored long to line up sponsors to support FPF’s launch in Grand Isle County. This is exciting stuff! So thanks to them, and to the these great launch sponsors (below). In fact, please take a moment to thank them and send some business their way!

If you’re new to Front Porch Forum and live (full or part-time) on the Islands, please sign up… it’s easy, free and won’t clog your inbox. Then go ahead and post a message to your neighbors. Want to know more? Take a tour or read what the local and national media have to say about FPF.

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My family and I were happily surprised by the good folks at Burlington’s East Village Cohousing with their Award for National Neighborhood Day. The certificate reads in part…

for their creation of the Centennial Front Porch Forum, which has brought us together to lead creative and more peaceful lives with our neighbors [Centennial is the broader neighborhood in which East Village Cohousing resides)…

How flattering to be recognized by a group of thoughtful people already living in intentional community! Thanks to the cohousing folks!

P.S. I believe they have a couple of units open at this time for anyone looking for an incredible housing/community opportunity in Burlington. Details… click here.

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Inman News columnist Gahlord Dewald posted a piece today aimed at real estate professionals about how they might make the most of social media tools. This clip caught my eye…

… If you expand beyond the “Big Three” social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you might find very specific platforms that align with your goals. For example, in Burlington, Vt., we have an awesome forum system called Front Porch Forum. This platform is highly targeted by neighborhood and operates via (wait for it …) e-mail.

Not what you might think of when you think super-new-cool technology. But FPF is a highly valued resource in our town. About 40 percent of the local population are members (and this is a college town). The neighbors talk about the neighborhood. Pretty relevant for a real estate professional.

Spending the time to locate active social media platforms that are topic-focused — to round out your me-focused Facebook-LinkedIn-Twitter participation — is a good idea…

… Front Porch Forum is what people make of it. I belong to the Orchards forum in South Burlington and sometimes it seems like there is even too much conversation going on (in a good way!). Our forum is made up of an area that you could walk through on foot in 1/2 an hour or less, which allows us to have conversations that really affect us all, like a specific stop sign or dog-walking ettiquite in our neighborhood park. For us, the size of our forum is perfect, because there are few enough people that we recognize names when we see them but enough voices to keep a conversation going.

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danah boyd’s post feels right on target… except for the “feeling like a bitch” part… fight the good fight, danah!

… I get hundreds of emails per day that I have to directly respond to. (Hundreds more get filtered into the “will read one day” folders that get very little attention.) I do a huge amount of my responding offline (on airplanes, public transit, cafes, etc.). Thus, messages with links take much longer to get my attention than messages without links. But there’s something nice about turning an INBOX into something manageable before people have the chance to respond. The problem with Web2.0 technologies is that each one wants to replace the INBOX (or at least be an additional channel). For example, there are private messages and comments on social network sites, direct messages and @replies on Twitter. There are blog comments. And RSS feeds. And then there are all of the online communities and bulletin boards and chat spaces that have evolved from those developed in olden days. For me, it’s too much. Too much I tell you. And we haven’t even gotten to voicemail, text messages. Let alone all that’s coming…

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The local Gannett outlet published an opinion piece yesterday about Front Porch Forum and social media…

… the writer is unfortunately misinformed about the depth and effectiveness that has been reached in filling the gap between formal local government assemblies by the Front Porch Forum… The FPF creators chose to capture its audience at the neighborhood level because people already naturally choose to organize and deal with critical issues in their lives at this level. So, in a way, the FPF forces government officials to “come down” to the neighborhood level and speak more openly about what they intend…

… The other was Meetup, a way for people to self-organize locally. I pulled a team together and we started Meetup.com in 2002.

A Meetup is about the simple idea of using the Internet to get people off the Internet. People feel a need to commiserate or get together and talk about what’s important to them. Our biggest categories are moms, small business, health support and fitness.

When we were designing the site, we were wrong about almost everything we thought people would want to use it for. I thought it would be a niche lifestyle venture, perhaps for fan clubs. I had no idea that people would form new types of P.T.A.’s, chambers of commerce or health support groups. And we weren’t thinking that anyone would want to meet about politics, but there are thousands of these Meetups.

People have organized more than 200,000 monthly Meetups in more than 100 countries. There’s nothing more powerful than a community coming together around a purpose. We spend increasingly more time in front of screens. We’re more connected technologically, but we’re less connected physically.

Meetup earns most of its revenue from the small monthly fee charged to organizers, 1 percent of our users. There are 60 of us in our Manhattan office, and we had our first profitable month in July.

Critics have predicted our death three times. If no one is predicting your company’s death, then you’re probably not taking enough risks in what you’re doing…

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What an honor! Front Porch Forum is headed to Washington, DC on Sept. 9 to participate in an event called Engaging Citizen 2.0: From Obama to the “MyFaceTube” Revolution, How is Social Media Reshaping Civic Engagement? We’ll be in the Library of Congress with several luminaries of the “using social media for civic engagement” crowd, including…

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.com

Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup.com

Joe Trippi, whom many Vermonters will recall from his “Dean for President” days

They’ve capped the gathering at about 100 folks from around the country who are among the top in this quickly emerging field. Thanks to The Case Foundation for FPF’s special invitation. I’m looking forward to learning from the conversation and sharing FPF’s amazing story of actual civic engagement catalyzed through FPF’s virtual front porch (here’s a recent sample).

This event will be streamed online live at www.ncoc.net and will be live on Twitter– follow @ncoc and #ncoc.

FPF will also swing by the Gov 2.0 Summit… again thanks to The Case Foundation.